CONSTRUCTION OF ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE ON SOCIAL MEDIA: A STUDY ON USERS COMMENTS ON THE MAGNIFICENT CENTURY TV SERIES’S FACEBOOK PAGE

Defined as the perception of the East through a “discourse” produced by Western cultural institutions, orientalism is a “system of imaginary ideologies”. The orientalist discourse in Western media texts essentially includes the claim of the universality of Western value judgments. Unlike traditional media, social media is one of the most effective ideological tools of today which contents can reach large audiences in a short time. In order to understand how the orientalist discourse is constructed in social media, users comments of the Magnificent Century TV Series’s Facebook page was taken as a sample in the study using discourse analysis. Since the construction of orientalist discourse on social media platforms depends on the content of media texts and user comments, it requires a two-way interpretation. For this reason, the study evaluated the limitations of orientalist discourse in user comments about the Series in the context of the content-target audience relationship on social media. As a result of the research, it was determined that users mostly developed a discourse that was compatible with the narrative in the Series, while sometimes they developed a controversial/dissident discourse by bringing a different interpretation to it.